How it works:
Write an entry of any length or style using five assigned words. Bold the five words. Tag your blog post with ’5wordchallenge’ and any other tags you wish to add. Feel free to pingback to this post or provide a link to your entry in comments. New words will be posted in two weeks.

How it works:Write an entry of any length or style using five assigned words. Bold the five words. Tag your blog post with ’5wordchallenge’ and any other tags you wish to add. If you’d like to select words for an upcoming challenge, chat with MsRedPen on her blog, DM her on Twitter, or send a message through the Vox Diaspora Yahoo! group or the ExVox forum.

When the bells ring, the tidings are never good. Only on Sunday morning, when they call us to worship, are they not bad, and even then, when you get to chapel, there is often news of incursions elsewhere. Places where the darkness has crept closer.

When the bells ring, loud and clear on the winter air, I lock the door and shutter the windows, and put salt round the mirror. It is vanity makes me keep silvered glass in my house, so Martha tells me. If she knew I was a witch… But she doesn’t know, and unless the Fae break through in force, she won’t find out today. Then I run upstairs, to shutter my bedroom window, and lock my spell-safe. If a Fae ever got into that –

Before I shutter the window, I cautiously look out. The wall is smoking over by the graveyard, but the breach appears more towards the castle. Which means the knights will fight the Fae, not me. They hate me, the knights, even though they eat my bread and wear my woollens. I remind them too much of the time before the Fae, before the walls between the worlds was broken. Not my fault, I want to cry. My grandmother, my stepfather, not me! Not me!

But I could. If I wanted to. I may only have a sketchy knowledge of magic, but I could turn their iron to mercury and have it puddle at their feet. I could stop the hearts of their horses as they stand. I could. But I won’t. Because although the knights are bad, the Fae are worse.

And here comes one. As the light fails, and the shadows darken below, I see her. She has long fingernails to take out my eyes, and long hair to bind my soul to the underworld. If I am not careful, if I do not shutter these windows now and creep, quiet as a mouse, quiet as the darkness itself, to the spell-safe. Only there might I find safety.

For I recognised Calentha. She knows my soul is black, and why I belong to the Fae as much as I belong to humanity. She wants me. She would take me to the shore and spill my blood there, watch it smoking on the black sand before I died. And I cannot have that. For my child needs me still, half-Fae and half-human as he is, he needs me more than ever his father did. So the salted mirror and the sleep herbs, the iron shutters and nailed doors are to keep us both safe.

How it works:
Write an entry of any length or style using five assigned words. Bold the five words. Tag your blog post with ‘5wordchallenge’ and any other tags you wish to add. New words will be posted in two weeks.

Words for this challenge were chosen by myself and Ross:monarchdaringobligatoryrampartscontradict

If you’d like to select words for an upcoming challenge, chat with MsRedPen on her blog, DM her on Twitter, or send her a message through the Vox Diaspora Yahoo! group or the ExVox forum.

Monarch butterflies are daring flyers. With wings measuring only four inches across, they travel great distances, a journey that takes them three generations to complete.

Laying eggs en route, then, is obligatory for their survival.

Watching them from the ramparts, I am envious of their freedom. Even the freedom to die without ever again seeing the place they were born, seems to me a freedom beyond measure. Do not contradict me with stories of want and need – I know of those. It is freedom I seek, freedom to marry, freedom to bear children as I wish, freedom to BE free.

How it works: Write an entry of any length or style using five assigned words. Bold the five words. Tag your blog post with ‘5wordchallenge’ and any other tags you wish to add. Feel free to pingback to this post or provide a link to your entry in comments.

This week’s words were chosen by Ross: monochrome, stilted, affluent, trestle and anachronism

If you’d like to select words for an upcoming challenge, chat with MsRedPen on her blog, DM her on Twitter, or send a message through the Vox Diaspora Yahoo! group or the ExVox forum.

I am in The Forwards, looking at this anachronism from my past. The mattress resting on the trestle is as battered as I remember. In those less affluent times, it was my bed for many years. I would pull the mattress from under Aunt Flo’s bed, get the two trestles from the side of the wardrobe, together with a sheet of plywood. First the plywood, then the mattress went on the trestles. I could not sit on my bed – the mattress overhung the plywood by 6 inches or more all the way round. So I tended to sleep curled up in a ball in the centre of the bed, a habit which remained into adulthood and ultimately led to my divorce.

My ex came from a family fallen on hard times through gambling and a stilted awkwardness. He saw me as someone who would save him. He had a tendency to see the world in monochrome, for people to be either his salvation or his damnation. When he realized I would not, could not, save him, I became his enemy so quickly that even I, who had been expecting this turnaround, was amazed at the speed with which he expunged me from his life.

It was a bitter divorce. Even though I agreed to all his demands except one, gave up money and possessions as though they were unimportant, he still could not accept that I would not let him take Aunt Flo’s house. “It needs too much work”, he would say, “Let me pay for it, and you can buy a new house”. He wanted to sell the land for redevelopment; I wanted to cling to the only bit of my past remaining.

So I start again, back in this place, this house. I toss the mattress into the garden to wait for the bin men to come; I may want to hang onto my past, but that doesn’t include stained, smelly mattresses!

How it works:Write an entry of any length or style using five assigned words. Bold the five words. Tag your blog post with ’5wordchallenge’ and any other tags you wish to add. Feel free to pingback to this post or provide a link to your entry in comments.

If you’d like to select words for an upcoming challenge, chat with me (MsRedPen) on my blog, DM me on Twitter, or send me a message through the Vox Diaspora Yahoo! group or the ExVox forum.

The whorls on my fingertips remind me of waves. One whorl took you away from me. None have bought you back.

When they found an oar, still held in the rowlock, the grain of the wood drew my eyes to the chip on the end – did it look like I had hit you? If they found you, could the petal-shaped wound be traced back to here? Could forensics tell, or had the sea washed away all evidence, like rain washes pollen from the sepal of a flower?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. All I know is you will never hit me again.

This is how it works: you get 5 words and with these 5 words you have to write an entry. The words might or might not be related. You decide how to combine them, and how long your entry will be. You tag your entry with 5wordchallenge and whatever other tags you like. Finally, you put the words in bold.

This is how it works: you get 5 words and with these 5 words you have to write an entry. The words might or might not be related. You decide how to combine them, and how long your entry will be. You tag your entry with 5wordchallenge and whatever other tags you like. Finally, you put the words in bold.

This week’s challenge: paws, shadow, ring, airy, chicken

In one week the challenge will be passed on to someone who participated in this one, hosted by Pearl.

The moon can cast a shadow. I never realised until I moved from the city to live by the sea just how much light the moon gives out. Its silvery light is pale, but oddly illuminating, and makes the conservatory seem airy and large.

I sit in the conservatory on moon full nights. I can sometimes hear the mice, the chittering they make, and the sound of their paws behind the skirting. But mostly I am alone here, just as I like it. No ring of the phone, no knock on the door. I sit and I watch and I wait.

Last night the fox got into the chicken coop again. How disappointed he was to discover they were already gone; gone to my stew pot and my freezer. I spent most of yesterday killing and plucking them. I shall feed him scraps, now. My neighbours would be angry. They see him as vermin, a pest; I like the way the moon shines on his back, how he sniffs and prances round the garden.

If I still had a dog, it would be different. But she, along with Mark, is buried under the tree in the garden of the house we shared, in London. One day, someone will find them. They will modernise, they will decide they don’t need a gazebo when the furthest point you see is the neighbours’ house. And then they will come looking for me.

Until then, I shall sit here. In my conservatory. By the light of the moon. Feeding the strays and weeding.